IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF
Also by Mike Marqusee
Anyone But England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket War Minus the Shooting: Journey Through South Asia During Cricket’s World Cup Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s
IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF
Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew
MIKE MARQUSEE
First published by Verso 2008
Copyright © Mike Marqusee 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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Verso
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USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
Ebook ISBN-978-1-84467-854-9
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
Contents
4 The Emancipation of the Jews
11 Confessions of a “Self-Hating Jew”
Preface
As long as there has been Zionism, there have been anti-Zionist Jews. Indeed, decades before it even came to the notice of non-Jews, anti-Zionism was a well-established Jewish ideology and until World War II commanded wide support in the diaspora. Today, as cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel, increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism. Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people—Jews and non-Jews—as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the first clause in Hillel’s ethical aphorism: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
Zionism is an ideology and a political movement. As such it is open to rational dispute, and on a variety of grounds. Jews, like others, might well view the Jewish claim to Palestine as irrational, anachronistic, and intrinsically unjust to other inhabitants. They might consider the Jewish state to be discriminatory or racist in theory and in practice or might object, on political, philosophical, or even specifically Jewish grounds, to any state based on the supremacy of a particular religious or ethnic group. As Jews, they might reject the idea that Jewish people constitute a “nation,” or at least a “nation” of the type that can or should become a territorial nation-state. Or they might have concluded on the basis of an examination of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that the underlying cause of the conflict was the ideology of the Israeli state.*
Any or all of the above should be sufficient to explain why some Jews would become anti-Zionists. But that doesn’t stop critics from placing us firmly in the realm of the irredeemably neurotic. In their eyes, we remain walking self-contradictions, a menace to our fellow Jews.
Of course, being an anti-Zionist Jew is a negative identity. It’s a disavowal of a politics commonly ascribed to Jews. And if one’s anti-Zionism is made up exclusively of a rejection of Zionism, then it’s not worth much. But for myself and for the anti-Zionist Jews I know, anti-Zionism is part and parcel of a larger opposition to racism and inequality, an expression of a positive solidarity with the Palestinians as victims of injustice and specifically of colonialism.
It should go without saying, but unfortunately cannot, that being an anti-Zionist by no means implies a desire to destroy the Jews who live in Palestine. On the contrary, anti-Zionism is founded on a refusal to countenance discrimination on racial or religious grounds. The Jews of Israel have every right to live safely, to follow (or not) their religious faith, to adhere (or not) to their cultural heritage, to speak Hebrew. What they do not have is the right to continue to dispossess and oppress another people.
Nonetheless, it is the anti-Zionists who are deemed to have transgressed an ethical boundary and thereby forfeited legitimacy. Like the Palestinians, we are doomed to fail the decisive test: recognition of Israel’s right to exist.
It’s extraordinary that a demand so often repeated is so rarely subjected to scrutiny. No one denies the fact of Israel’s existence, and the realities that flow from that, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognize the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). Anti-Zionists are condemned because they refuse to certify as democratic a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy. For a Jew to fail to subscribe to the unsustainable notion that the State of Israel can be both “Jewish” and “democratic” is a sure sign of self-hatred.
Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, they are met with ad hominem criticism. Their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity as Jews are questioned. There is often assumed to be a disjunction